Back in the saddle again

Hello folks I’m back after a few years off. I just got my 120 SCA box back running. I was very underenthused about getting it going after a move so I hired the guys from the LFS to put it together. It’s been running about a month and finished cycling. I have one lonely flame angel in there and a couple Zoas I put in yesterday. Parameters are all good. In fact a little too good. A couple weeks ago phosphates were about 2 and this week 0.0. Ran the test twice to be sure. I’m running carbon and gfo reactors. In a short time I’ve already screwed up something. The other day watching a BRS video I realized I was doing the carbon wrong. It was gently tumbling. So I changed it out and set the foam pads to hold it still. But I forgot to rinse out the charcoal first.(that was on another video). So I figure the tank got dosed with carbon. I wonder if that’s the same as vodka or sugar dosing? That’s my only explanation for the low po4. Nitrates seemed to be down from 5 to 4 also. Any thoughts?

 

So I’ve been watching the po4 for about 4 or 5 days and hanna is still saying 0.0. I have no way to account for that except the carbon reactor dump from about a week ago. I’ve taken the gfo and carbon off line for the past couple days and still no po4. Only have one dwarf angel and some turbos. Just not sure if I trust Hanna or if it’s correct, is the low phosphate a problem? I’ll be running a test on the water at the lfs to see if the Hanna is registering anything.

 

Went to lfs today and confirmed that po4 is 0.0. Hanna checker is working fine and responded to phosphate at the store. So the only conclusion I come to is that I carbon dosed by not washing the carbon before running it in the reactor. I guess carbon is carbon regardless of the source. The lfs said he’s carbon dosing a large tank and is manually adding phosphate. It seems po4 runs out before no3 when carbon dosing and if you want to continue bringing down nitrate by carbon dosing you have to add phosphate. All makes sense. Seems like an opportune time to add another fish. And maybe in the mean time I’ll

 

^ that is the phosphate source. One capsule in 500 ml of ro water. He doses about 200 ml/day in a 250 gallon tank.